| "The
Tibetans I visited in Flushing eight to a room five years
ago are now training as nurses, working legally in legit companies,
living in apartments better than mine, and no longer doing
crass mindless jobs in dodgy factories." |
There are two main views about the latest Great Tibetan Exodus.
One says that it is a disaster that is going to wreck the Tibetan
community — all those Dharamsala officials and settlement
officials deserting their posts, eight people sleeping to a room
in Flushing, girls with university degrees working for years as
babysitters in Manhattan and drunken Tibetan youths fighting every
Saturday night in New York discotheques. Not to mention the spectre
of all those future Tibetan and half-Tibetan children who will
be brought up chewing gum and wearing baseball hats, without being
able to speak a word of their parent’s mother tongue.
The other view says the Exodus is going to be a source of rejuvenation
and modern skills that will reinvigorate the entire Tibetan community.
Times will be tough at first, proponents of this view say, but
soon there will be five-storey mansions in the Hamptons owned
by Tibetans who made it big on the Stock Exchange, children at
Ivy League universities, Wall Street companies run by Tibetans,
and endless remittances flowing back to India.
The truth is, the second is already happening. I don’t
move in the right circles, and I still think a jacuzzi is a cocktail
and a colada is a place to store food in, so I haven’t been
invited to any Long Island Mansions yet, let alone one in the
Hamptons. But I have heard stories of some here already, and I
have been to even bigger ones in Nepal owned by Tibetans who will
no doubt be here shortly. Already some highly competent young
Tibetans have turned up as students at my (obscenely expensive)
university, not least the esteemed Editor of this publication.
And at least two — Tsering Ngodup and Tsewang Namgyal —
are well established figures in professional banking and investment.
The Tibetans I visited in Flushing eight to a room five years
ago are now training as nurses, working legally in legit companies,
living in apartments better than mine, and no longer doing crass
mindless jobs in dodgy factories. It hasn’t taken them the
generation that previous communities had to struggle through before
they could make it here - it has taken less than half a decade.
You have to hand it to them: amongst immigrant communities, in
terms of survival, adaptation and skill, Tibetans have to be among
the very best at this kind of rapid adaptation.
The plus side to this rapid turn in events is immense. The Dharamsala
project of holding a vast exile community together under a recognised,
dynamic leadership benefits from the sudden turn-up in remittances.
Already, say the TCV administrators, most children in their schools
today are funded by Tibetans. It’s an amazing development.
It means that Tibetans can begin to dream of a time when the old,
sad, sick byin-dak culture will have been forgotten and replaced
by one of self-reliance and indigenous resources. There will be
no more need for pleading to westerners and rich south-east Asians
for hand-outs and sympathy, or not at least for laypeople (the
monasteries are another story). No need any more to have Richard
Gere as the backroom Minister of Finance, or to offer precious
titles to certain Movie Action Men in exchange for donations,
or to have His Holiness shake hands with rich capitalists whom
you and I wouldn’t share a momo with. That’s the dream.
It could happen.
| "Cultures
flourish only if they change — that’s true.
But cultures need a core of felt commitment and vivid recollection
to stay alive, and it isn’t going to be easier to
hang on to these in the West, when the only Tibetan language
left might be in Sunday schools, and then only for the really
keen." |
But there is a cost as well. For one thing, the humans have gone:
nearly 5% of the Indian community may have left for New York alone
in as many years. Some will be doperidden drifters in India who
will eventually flourish here as Tarzans in the urban jungle (as
for the Janes, they are already flourishing; it’s only the
men who are slow). But others were part of the India community’s
intellectual capital, and the damage of their flight could be
immense, and not only to morale. Plus there’s a bigger cost.
Not every immigrant community that shifts or is forced abroad
needs to retain a distinctive culture. But many Tibetans want
to retain just that, and some even say that they want to get their
country back, as they have every right to do. Retaining that culture
is going to be hard — like, really hard. Invigorating it
will be ten times tougher.
Let’s be honest, folks: retaining that culture worked for
a while after the first Great Tibetan Exodus 45 years ago, but
it’s since failed even in India, outside the monasteries.
I would guess that most of the kids who are not monks there don’t
read Tibetan well, are not much expert in religion, know nothing
about Tibet, and haven’t the faintest idea that there are
dozens — 3,000 I think is the actual figure — of modern
stories, poems and novels written in Tibetan in the last twenty
years. They’re Tibindians. Nothing wrong with that. No-one
wants a Chassidic-Amish-Wahabi-type community of unreconstructed,
medievalist religious Tibetan fundamentalists, however rich they
are. Cultures flourish only if they change — that’s
true.
But cultures need a core of felt commitment and vivid recollection
to stay alive, and it isn’t going to be easier to hang on
to these in the West, when the only Tibetan language left might
be in Sunday schools, and then only for the really keen.
So the going could be difficult in the next few years. It’s
starting to look possible that a number of Tibetans might get
rich. There’s a good chance that even the weakest ones might
stay away from drugs and crime, and that the families back in
India will prosper from the dollars flying in their direction.
But will it turn out to have been worthwhile? I would guess that
there’s going to have to be a whole lot of serious discussion
about collective ideals, ethics, culture, language and identity
before these issues get answered. It’s going to take debate,
leadership, listening and initiative to work those answers out.
Otherwise this latest Exodus might turn out not to be leading
to a promised land worth getting to.
Robbie Barnett is a lecturer of Modern Tibet
at Columbia University in the City of New York.
The Tibetans: A Struggle to Survive. Steve
Lehman, Robbie Barnett and Robert Coles. Red Wheelbarrow Books,1998.
This photographic book includes an essay by Robbie Barnett. (Available
at Amazon.)
